Entombed (4 page)

"What would you guess
this is?" Catherine asked me, holding up a twisted piece of black
metal. "A pair of spectacles or-"

The crowded space
reverberated with the shrill screech of a woman who looked as though
she had been one of the earliest female graduates of the distinguished
law school. She was on the far side of the room and several of the men
rushed to help her to a chair.

"Poor old dame
probably got nailed by the backswing of a crowbar," Catherine said.
"Every ambulance chaser in the house will be looking for a piece of the
action."

We walked toward the
site of the commotion. A couple of welldressed visitors had moved to
the staircase to hold off onlookers from above, while others clustered
in front of the fractured bricks, staring into a dark hole and
murmuring their surprise. One man moved aside and I stepped into his
place.

Perfectly smooth
ivory-colored bones framed the empty orbital sockets that met my
horrified stare. I was face-to-face with a human skull, buried behind
the ancient wall.

4

Mike Chapman stood in
front of the skeletal head that had been exposed in the basement of the
Third Street building. "The Thin Man, eh, Coop? What homicide dick
wouldn't give his left leg to come face-to-face with the Thin Man?"

The professor assigned
by the law school dean to wait out the arrival of the police didn't
seem to appreciate Mike's humor and had no reason to know that every
unidentified corpse he encountered was given a nickname, some way for
him to personalize the task at hand.

"Whaddaya expect me to
do here?" Mike said, turning to Nan and me. "It's not even my
jurisdiction."

"You think I'd call
those guys at Manhattan South after the way they treated me on that
last case?" I said.

"I'm not talking
geography." Mike was the very best detective assigned to Manhattan
North Homicide, the elite squad responsible for all unnatural deaths
from the farthest tip of the island down to Fifty-ninth Street, and we
had worked scores of investigations together. "I'm talking centuries. I
got people tripping over me and my partner to get to the morgue-they're
shooting and stabbing each other, sticking up bodegas for nickels and
dimes, throwing babies out windows like there were trampolines on the
sidewalk, filling hypodermics with poison and poppin' 'em in their
veins. Current events are overwhelming me and you broads call me down
here 'cause some old colonial codger got buried in the basement two
hundred years ago?"

The construction
workers had started to pull the bricks away to about chest level. The
figure seemed frozen in place, raised arms bent and fingers
outstretched, as though they had been pressing against the wall that
had entombed them.

But the workmen
stopped at that point-at our urging-as the bones began to shift and
several ribs dropped away to the floor of the dark hole in which the
fully articulated skeleton stood.

"I called Hal Sherman
at the Crime Scene Unit while Alex was looking for you," Nan said to
Mike. Every prosecutor had a favorite detective and we each hoped to
get one of them to respond as quickly as possible this time. "I think I
can still hear him laughing."

"You picked the right
night, bright eyes. CSU's got a pile of body parts sticking out of a
snow mound that was plowed off a street in TriBeCa last weekend and a
domestic with five down, the perp still out looking for his wife's
goombah. You bet Sherman's laughing at you. This antique bag of bones
is not going to be a priority for him or anybody else in the department
until the spring thaw. It'll probably take the docs that long to figure
out what they've got and how long it's been here."

Professor Walter Davis
stepped away from the skeleton. "What do you propose to do about this,
Mr. Chapman?"

"I've got a call into
the medical examiner's office. They'll send a death investigator over
to figure out how to dismantle this character properly and give him a
place to lay down for a while. Long time to be on your feet."

"Who's coming?" I
asked.

Mike shrugged. "I
asked for Dorfman. Andy Dorfman."

The office had only
one forensic anthropologist. The overwhelming number of old bones that
people came across in an urban setting belonged to animals that had
once roamed the place more freely, and sometimes to humans who had died
of natural causes. Every now and then, the remains could be linked to a
homicidal death.

"That's why you
stopped the digging?"

"You got it. Andy
doesn't like anybody touching his bones until he's eyeballed the setup
for himself. I'm just waiting to see if he's available so I can help
him get started."

Dorfman was a
perfectionist, a brilliant detail man who at thirty-eight had been a
leader in this specialty long before recent television shows and
popular media made his work seem chic. We had recently consulted him to
determine the identity of a body that had been reduced to charred
pieces of bone and left in the furnace of an abandoned building in
Harlem. The ex-lover who killed his pregnant girlfriend was convicted
on the basis of the forensic work, and as a result of Dorfman's
success, the chief medical examiner hired him away from his academic
position at a Texas university.

"Look, Mr. Chapman.
Can we just lock up the basement and get about our business? Surely
this… this"-Professor Davis waved his hand at the silent skeleton-"this
can wait until tomorrow."

"You got somebody's
briefs you got to get into? We can handle this without you."

Davis fidgeted and
kept looking to the staircase. It was not unusual for people to be
uncomfortable in the presence of death, but these remains looked more
like an exhibit in a museum or medical school display case than those
of someone who had recently shuffled off his mortal coil.

"The dean asked me to
wait with you. Of course I'll stay."

"How old's this
tenement?" Mike asked.

Nan had gone upstairs
to refresh our glasses of wine and bring one for Mike. The dean had
swept everyone else out of the building, including the bartenders, who
had abandoned their station but left their cargo behind.

"It was built more
than two hundred years ago," Davis said. "That's what all the community
fuss was about when the law school trustees bought the place.
Neighborhood people wanting to declare it a historic landmark, even
though it wasn't architecturally significant. I handled the lawsuit for
the university."

Mike lifted his glass
to the Thin Man. "Cheers, buddy. We'll have you out of that wall in no
time."

"Can these scientists
actually tell, Detective, how long this body has been here?"

"It's a little bit of
modern forensics and a lot of circumstantial evidence. Me, I like when
you find one of these guys clutching an old newspaper with the date on
it. The 1805 town crier, with the latest reports on Napoléon's
victory over the Austrians at Austerlitz. Short of that, I turn it all
over to the medical examiner," Mike said.

"Strange way for
someone to go to his eternal rest, isn't it?" I asked. "Standing up
inside a brick coffin."

"And naked. Unless his
drawers fell down to his kneecaps and I just can't see them in there,
he's stark naked. Somebody could have had the decency to spring for a
black suit, don't you think?" Mike said, turning back to the professor.
"Were there people living here when the university bought the building?"

Davis nodded. "Yes, it
was completely occupied until a couple of years ago. This basement was
the original kitchen of the house, which explains some of the pottery
and cooking tools that have been dug up. Then in the 1940s it was a
restaurant called Bertololloti's, refitted for apartments in the
sixties. In fact, it's generally been students and faculty who've lived
in here going back decades. The way the campus has grown, it's
conveniently in the middle of things."

"I know a few guys who
are gonna hate you for this, Coop. Some poor slob over at the cold case
squad will be digging through occupancy records and census data till
his pension vests, trying to figure out whether any tenants disappeared
or people were reported missing over the past few centuries."

Professor Davis had
seated himself on the edge of the table in the far corner, where the
recently dug artifacts were displayed. "You don't hear a heartbeat, do
you?"

Mike smiled at him. "I
didn't see you drinking, Mr. Davis. These bones have been picked clean."

"The floorboards,
Detective. I'm not talking about the chest cavity."

Mike looked at me
quizzically but I was just as puzzled as he.

"No telltale heart,
Mr. Chapman? I'll give your colleagues a head start. This building was
once the home of Edgar Allan Poe. This grim little structure was known
to the neighbors as Poe House."

5

Mike Chapman ushered
Andy Dorfman down the narrow staircase shortly after 9
P.M.
"The last place
that Poe lived in
Manhattan, that's what the professor was telling us. Eighteen
forty-five, right?"

"Eighteen forty-five,
forty-six. It was called Amity Street then. Number Eighty-five Amity
Street. Greenwich Village," Davis said.

Dorfman was as excited
by the find as I was. The literature major in me thought it
extraordinary to be in these haunting surroundings that Poe had
actually inhabited. The literary provenance seemed to matter not at all
to the forensic anthropologist. He made straight for the skeleton and
spent several minutes just staring at it, his two technicians over his
shoulder, before he set his large metal case on the floor and opened it
to remove some of his tools and a camera.

Mike leaned in to talk
to Andy. "What can I do to be useful? Imagine you've got the greatest
American writer of his time, the man who created the first fictional
detective-damn, I bet Coop can recite his poetry, can't you?-and all
the while he's living next door to a corpse."

Andy waved him off.
"Back off, Mike. Let me get some shots before we open this up. Any bets
that Poe himself was the perp?"

I thought of all the
stories I had read from adolescence on by the master who created the
genre that had become modern crime writing, including everything from
mystery and detection to horror.

"That's like
suggesting someone in my own family's a murderer," Nan said. "Don't
break my heart."

"You have to admit," I
said, as Andy's flash went off repeatedly and his assistant loaded film
into a second camera, "he was fascinated with premature burial and
entombing people in odd ways."

"These bones are gonna
talk to Andy. They're gonna tell him everything," Mike said. "Seven
hundred homicides a year citywide. How many are like this-skeletal
remains?"

"Only one for the last
twelve months," Andy answered.

"No wonder you're so
frisky. You might earn your keep, starting out the new year with
something to dig your teeth into."

Pathologists worked
with soft tissue-flesh, brains, organs. Anthroplogists worked with
bone, and rarely in New York City did Andy get the chance to do only
that.

"Here's what we're
going to do. The three of us will try to take another section of
brickwork down. You got gloves, Mike? I may need you to hold on to your
friend here as we remove the support in front of him. Then we'll see
whether there's anything inside with him, on the ground, to give us a
sense of date."

Mike pulled a pair of
rubber gloves out of his rear pants pocket and started to put them on,
while Andy's assistant tossed some to Nan and to me.

"So, where's his
fingers?" Mike asked, stepping toward the wall.

"The phalanges
probably dropped off. Small bones do that," Andy said, shining his
flashlight over the side of the brick column and looking down. "The
spinal ligament's still in place. That's what connects the bones to
each other, so it keeps the body and head together-for the moment. But
your friend's never going to come out of here in one piece. This will
be a long night."

Andy and his team were
suited for work in white lab coats and boots, and they laid out a sheet
on the floor in front of the skeleton's vertical coffin. Professor
Davis watched us from his remote corner of the room.

With construction
tools that they had brought with them, Andy's assistants began to chip
carefully away at the layer of bricks. The first four came out easily,
and still the upper torso remained in place.

"Mind if I try
something?" Mike said, lifting one of the stones and carrying it over
to the table. He compared it with several others that had been mounted
there and labeled as objects from the original foundation. "Looks like
it could be as old as the ones removed from another part of the wall
earlier today."

"This building has
been restored and rehabilitated so many times over the years that it's
entirely possible there were piles of the old materials just stored
down here in the basement, maybe used and reused," Professor Davis said.

Andy was bagging a
couple of the bricks, and into another envelope he was scraping the
substance that had bonded each of them to the others. "Whatever this
cementlike compound is might give us a clue about age."

He laid the bags
carefully on the floor, to be tagged and numbered, just as each piece
of stone had come down from the wall.

I picked one up and
ran my gloved finger over the surface, smoothing out the plastic so I
could examine the stone. It was the color of a burnt sienna Crayola,
faded from its once red glaze. It was pocked and pitted on the exterior
surface, smooth on the sides where it had been resting against one of
its mates. The taupecolored sealant was clumped on the top and bottom,
some substance that had fixed it in place for all the years it had been
here.